Abstract
Male subjects, purportedly being observed by an audience, received failure feedback while working on a task (rating dialogues for neuroticism). Help was readily available, from a male or female assistant, and the primary dependent variable was whether or not subjects requested help. Embarrassment was postulated as the major inhibitor of help seeking in this situation. Self-report measures of embarrassment and perceived accuracy were taken throughout the session. The independent variables were: task centrality (sex-role appropriateness), sex of assistant, expectation of future interaction with the audience, self-esteem, and sex-role ideology (“traditional” vs “feminist” beliefs). The principal results for help seeking were: high esteem traditional subjects sought help less frequently on the central (male) task and more frequently sought help on the peripheral (female) task; feminists did not differ in help seeking according to sex of task. Increased embarrassment was not generally associated with inhibition of help seeking. In fact, there was a trend for high embarrassment to be reported immediately before help was sought. To explain these results, two forms of embarrassment are distinguished — the embarrassment due to continued failure, which should result in seeking help to bring about success, and anticipated embarrassment involved in the act of seeking help, which should inhibit help-seeking behavior.
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This research was supported in part by Public Health Service Predoctoral Fellowship #5-MH-48172 to the author and NIMH Grant #18762 to Alan E. Gross and Irving M. Piliavin. It was based on a dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. I wish to thank Leonard Berkowitz, Burt Kaplan, and Irving Piliavin for assistance in various phases of design and completion of the experiment. In addition, the experiment could never have been run without the help of Patti Ambroziak, Carol Bergdoll, Lorraine Broll, Fred Koerner, Malcolm Lindsay, Rick Tessler, and Janet Zvibleman. Special thanks go to my friends and colleagues, Allan E. Gross and Kenneth A. Wallston, for help in every phase of the experiment, especially encouragement, prodding and editorial assistance, and to Larry Wrightsman for comments on a draft of the manuscript.
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Wallston, B.S. The effects of sex-role ideology, self-esteem, and expected future interactions with an audience on male help seeking. Sex Roles 2, 353–365 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00302804
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00302804